IE8 is killing my Windows 7 joy

Posted on January 22nd, 2009 by admin

I have IE 8.0.7000.0 with my Windows 7 Beta. And at the moment there is no other way of saying this –

IE 8 is killing my enjoyment of Windows 7.

Here’s what I’d like to say – There are a lot of good features in IE8 like accelerators and a blank tab showing recent history and other good stuff.

However the negatives are preventing me from appreciating the positives. Here are things that are gumption traps and distracting me from having a great, productive Windows 7 experience –

  1. I might be mistaken here – However, Task Manager shows multiple IE processes running. Its almost as if a process gets started every few tabs. 
  2. IE 8 takes too much memory – in the hundreds of MB of memory. It does not scale well. A lot of tabs leads to more and more memory being taken up. It almost seems as if there is a memory leak.
  3. It literally takes 3 seconds from the point that I click on a tab to it actually opening. Now that I think of it that sort of hints that they actually are starting a new process. 
  4. Some websites don’t work. 
  5. When I use Speech Recognition to ‘start internet explorer’ i get three options i.e. IE 32 bit, IE 64 bit, IE 32 bit with add-ons disabled.  Why is this decision not made for me?
  6. Wordpress editing doesn’t work on one of my sites. 
  7. One of my forums can’t log me in when I’m using IE8. 
  8. IE8 tabs crash – regularly, and then it automatically saves the tabs and brings them up – which is great. Except when the recovered tab had crashed. Because it crashes again. 

I understand this is a Beta of Windows 7 – Why then is Windows 7 working absolutely great, and IE8 behaving like a pre-alpha version?

I really hope Microsoft takes this as feedback and cleans up IE and makes it perform better and not mess up all the time. I only use Windows 7 and I only use IE8 – so perhaps I’m seeing a lot more errors than someone who tests it for a few minutes or a few hours. However I should be seeing very few errors – ideally no errors.

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2 Responses to “IE8 is killing my Windows 7 joy”

  1. Mike, on January 24th, 2009 at 5:06 am Said:

    I’m loving Win7. But I have to say, why keep using Internet Exploiter? It’s light years behind Firefox in features and customisation.

    Firefox will alleviate your issues with IE8 :-)

  2. Thomas, on May 11th, 2009 at 6:18 pm Said:

    In my opinion Chrome, Safari, or Mozilla will easily wipe the floor with IE8…

    Besides, IE8 still hasn’t copied all it could from other browsers. It only got a couple good ones, like the thing where it opens up your recent history in a new blank tab. That one they got from Chrome.

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